Heidi Crebo-Rediker
In the run-up to World War II, the United States had become dangerously overdependent on foreign imports of critical minerals and metals—even though officials had warned about the supply chain’s vulnerabilities for a decade. Congress passed an act creating the National Defense Stockpile in 1939. But when the United States went to war a year later, the scale and urgency of its immediate defense needs still vastly exceeded its domestic mining and production facilities as well as its new stockpile.
President Franklin Roosevelt had to rush to shift control of the stockpile to a newly created agency—the Metals Reserve Company, run by civilian industrialists—that scoured the globe to buy or barter for whatever it could from wherever it could at whatever cost. To sustain the war economy, government agencies and private industry also expanded U.S. domestic mining and refining operations, engineered synthetic material substitutes, and funded technological advances to improve mines’ efficiency and productivity. Although the United States went on to decisively win the war, the country’s lack of preparedness led to excess emergency spending as it struggled to outbid the Axis powers for critical materials and costly delays in ramping up the production of tanks, aircraft, and munitions. Washington had to rely on risky and untested foreign sources for minerals and metals and use shipping routes vulnerable to attack.
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